Issue 137: Finally Choosing My Watch Of 2024
You always fall in love just when you've convinced yourself it's never going to happen
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is still going through a certain degree of soul-searching. If you stand still you’re falling behind, as the management gurus on LinkedIn say, and in that spirit I am continuing to tweak the makeup of the newsletter every week. This week’s issue is pretty clean: you’ve got a watch review that’s really a little bit of a journey of self-discovery, and a few thoughts on three recent releases: the Oris PPX ‘Miss Piggy’, Omega’s Speedmaster Moonphase Meteorite, and of course Vacheron Constantin’s 222 in stainless steel. Hope you enjoy!
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Review: Grand Seiko SLGW003
How I learned that a cynic can still fall in love1
I spent quite a lot of time at the tail end of last year trying to answer one simple question: “What’s your watch of the year?” I was asked it by magazines like Square Mile and Esquire, the latter quite rightly taking me to task for naming well over a dozen watches in response. I was asked it at social events - horological ones, anyway - and I was asked it by readers.
I’m not sure I gave the same answer twice, and to an extent - as borne out by my response to Johnny Davis at Esquire - I stand by that. Asking a full-time watch writer to pick a favourite watch is asking for trouble. This is the lifeblood of my professional existence; you might as well ask me to pick a favourite word, or letter of the alphabet. However, a couple of candidates did present themselves right at the very end of the year and for different reasons, I never mentioned either.
The first is the Greubel Forsey Nano Foudroyante EWT. I have followed Greubel Forsey pretty closely for a decade or so, and while I have always held their work in very high regard, there have been vanishingly few timepieces of theirs that I actually coveted. It says a lot about how tastes have changed in recent years that GF’s superb finishing and deep commitment to the craft of watchmaking were no longer enough to make up for the fact that the watches themselves were, how shall I put it, not classically beautiful. The Tourbillon 24 Seconds Vision was an exception, but I was unconvinced by the brand’s attempt at sports watches - seemed like too much of a naked play for Richard Mille’s audience - and the corporate goings-on and oscillating strategy over the last few years has also been a distraction from the business of just making, as many people used to refer to them, the best damn watches on the planet.
So the Nano Foudroyante EWT represents something of a dream for me: a Greubel Forsey at a manageable size, incorporating the kind of innovation they have excelled at pursuing and still looking the business when you turn it over. I think, recency bias notwithstanding, it came along too late in the year to figure in many people’s best-of lists, and now runs the risk of being trampled by the onrush of 2025 ‘novelties’, but it is clearly an outstanding watch.
I haven’t seen it in person, however. It doesn’t seem like many people have, and this is why I am actually here to talk about a quite different watch altogether. I may fall truly in love with it when I do eventually get my hands on it - and at that point I will probably go into depth on what it actually does, but in considering the question that started off this ramble, I have been led to once again think about what criteria I really care about when picking a favourite.
Perhaps surprisingly I am unmoved by the clear majority of watches I come across. I can’t tell you exactly when this realisation hit me. I am definitely going through a phase in my career of being far more interested in the creations of smaller independent brands; the price rises, rinse-and-repeat approach to design and sledgehammer-subtle marketing of the mainstream brands having had the same effect on me as it obviously has had on a great many customers. Maybe I have been over-exposed to it all, and the stories are wearing thin, or all blurring into one. I know how lucky I am to get a chance to play around with watches that people will wait years to acquire, or that are so limited very few people will ever see them in the metal, but for most of last year, they failed to raise as much as a flutter. I began to feel scornful of people who expressed gushing adoration for new releases2. Surely staying steadfastly cynical and objective is the better, more high-minded way, I thought. I shall adopt a zen-like state of dispassionate watch judgement!
And then it happened. A watch was delivered to my house that made me feel something again.
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